Stinking Rich

I used to think that stories were a waste of time. A petty distraction or a little damnation. But, fortunately, I haven't decided to stop telling them, and the theatre is paying me a wage to for this one. But, just for the record. I don't want to be here. So there you go.

I split up with my girlfriend recently. Very recently. A few hours ago in fact. Actually, I guess she split up with me. And you know where that leaves me, eh? A writer without a girlfriend. Homeless.

So. We split up…she with me. And I did the gentlemanly thing and promptly went out to drown my sorrows with a few whiskies. So. There you go. Then I followed it with fish and chips and found myself down by the beach, emptying my guts over the railings. Must have been something wrong with the fish.

So. I'm peering out over the railings, watching the trail of bile flap in the wind, gazing out to the churn of the sea and the gently bruising sky. And as the wind dropped, a voice rose up from beneath me, and I realised that of all the long stretch between the palace pier and the shattered skeleton to the west, I had stopped right over the heads of a whippet-thin man in a battered tweed hat and a girl who could only be his daughter. She must have been in her twenties, a little over four foot tall, with a round chubby face and curly black hair. She was talking about her job "in the office" and how she had taken a pay cut to keep a junior spot in the admin department.

Suddenly embarrassed by my intrusion on her world, I began to creep away, until the old man's voice cut across her, freezing me where I stood.

"I heard this story one time, of a guy who'd sold his soul for a single company ISA, and had woken himself up the next morning by vomiting all over his pillow.

Buried in the puddle of bile and diced carrots had been a crisp, neatly folded ten pound note. At first he thought that he must have accidentally swallowed the prize from a crisp packet, until his stomach heaved again and he followed up with a fifty. Tentatively, he had wedged two fingers down his throat, and brought up another, then another, until his wallet was full of damp, slightly ill smelling notes.

That evening, he celebrated his good fortune in a bar in Soho, and, after mixing the grape and the grain, had borrowed a bucket and returned a richer man that he had set out. The taxi driver who drove him home wrinkled his nose slightly as he took a twenty pound tip.

The thin man looked down at his daughter and raised an eyebrow. "Are you listening?"
"Yes father." She answered, rolling a pebble between her thumb and forefinger.

"Anyway, this taxi driver, as he was driving home, wrinkling his nose all the way, began to chat as most taxi drivers do. And he leaned back in the drivers seat and sniffed again and belched lightly and followed through with 'You going anywhere nice for your holidays, then?'"

"Of course, our man, drunk as he was, wasn't in much of a state to reply, but the cabby, as cabbies are wont to do, kept on talking."

"' I had this fare the other day who went sky diving. Given it up for fly-fishing, it seems. On account of a bad experience with a friend of his. Seems he and his mate had a bet on that his mate wouldn't be able to jump. The two of them took all the training, put on the gear, and went up in this little plane. All the way above the clouds. He and this mate of his were at the door of the plane, and at the last minute, his friend gets the jitters. Says he can't do it. And they argue, but times moving on, so this guy has to make the jump on his own. Friend stays in the plane and this guy leaps out into the sky, dances mid-air, free-falls for two hundred meters, and can't open his parachute. Hits the ground and breaks both his legs. What's more, the plane hits a pylon and sends twenty thousand volts through the cockpit. Fries the pilot and the mate to a crisp. Funny that, isn't it?'"

"And the man would have liked to reply, but instead, just vomited up another ten pound note in the back of the cab."

"This continued for many weeks, and the man noticed that his usually corpulent frame was growing slimmer, and his wallet was getting fatter with every pound he lost, until he finally became a thin millionaire, and married a pretty girl with no sense of smell…"

"And?"
"And what? They married. Marriage is a blessed union. They're still married. Very happy."
"So there's no moral?"
"Nah. Unless 'Some people are just plain lucky' works for you."
"Oh." The girl looked back out to the wide rolling ocean, continued tossing the pebble back and forth in her hand. "I see"

He patted her reassuringly on the shoulder. "Good girl."

Then he rose and, with his daughter following, moved away, down the beach, crunching pebbles as he went.